Paranoia must be building in Iran for Israel strike to humiliate it like this

Iran is wounded, humiliated and weakened — and extremely dangerous. 

Senior military and nuclear chiefs have been assassinated, some in their homes. Israeli commandos have struck tightly guarded air defence installations. Agents have smuggled drones deep inside the state, exposing Iran’s feared internal security as inattentive and hapless.

Maybe it was looking the wrong way: when I was in Tehran, in 2019, I was accused by one muttering security agent of being a spy, despite being accompanied everywhere I went by a government-provided minder.

It might be able to arrest student protesters and enforce head-scarf rules — but it can’t touch Mossad’s operatives.

It is harder now for Iran to retaliate. Its Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad, is gone. Its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, has been decapitated. The Houthis in Yemen harass shipping and launch the occasional missile, but they’re not an existential threat to Israel.

So what does Iran do next?

Iran’s supreme leader, the 86-year-old Ali Khamanei, will be under immense pressure to respond.

There’s no real danger that his regime will be overthrown — there are plenty of disgruntled citizens, weary of sanctions and tired of the “death to America” chants of the religious autocracy, but there is no significant opposition or effective anti-government movement — but inaction makes Khamanei and his supporters seem weak.

The easiest, quickest act is to launch more missiles. That’s the immediate threat to Israel right now, and it’ll keep Israeli citizens inside their bunkers and basements over the weekend and into next week as they anticipate more strikes.

Ballistic missiles are much harder to intercept than drones, and waves of missiles launched simultaneously can overwhelm Israeli air defences. We saw that last October, when around 180 missiles were launched from Iran and about two dozen made it through, some striking Israel’s biggest city, Tel Aviv.

But any significant death toll in Israel from missile attacks would prompt more severe Israeli strikes on Iran — and next time, Israel might not confine itself to attacks on military installations and nuclear research sites. Surface-to-air missile sites have been destroyed across Iran, and its weakened air defences have yet to take out a single Israeli jet.

The paranoia inside Iran right now must be overwhelming — if Mossad can pinpoint figures like revolutionary guards commander Hossein Salami and army chief of staff Mohammad Bergheri, it can take out political and religious leaders, too.

Loading

Iran’s proxy army in Lebanon, Hezbollah, retains the capacity to launch missiles across the Lebanon-Israel border, but it’s not the threat that it once was. The militia was devastated by months of air strikes, the pager attack that wounded an estimated 2,700 of its senior operatives in September and the killing of its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

It’s so difficult for Iran to directly attack Israel that its leaders might be tempted to authorise attacks on other targets: like US troops in Iraq, Saudi oil refineries, shipping in the Persian Gulf, or Israeli or US civilians around the world.

The US said it was not involved in the strikes on Iran, but Iran is already treating it as an American-backed attack and both Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have said they were told of the imminent attacks, and were in favour of this type of unilateral act. US employees and their families had already been withdrawn from some foreign postings.

Negotiations to freeze Iran’s nuclear program were going nowhere. The attacks might push Iran back to the table — Israel hit key nuclear sites but didn’t directly attack Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium, which are buried deep underground.

But it’s also possible that Iran will now abandon the pretence of negotiations and push ahead with enrichment, deep underground, out of reach of both Mossad and the Israeli Air Force.